Because of the well-documented cybersecurity skills gap, it has become a significant trend for organizations to rely on IT personnel to transition to security operations or to take on additional security responsibilities. This is a difficult transition for both the employees and the organization that, without the right tools in place, will require a great deal of training and ongoing oversight. Otherwise, the employees will struggle and there will be a high risk of mistakes leading to damaging cyberattacks.
A security orchestration, automation, and response (SOAR) platform can be an invaluable tool in easing this transition because of the way SOAR guides and streamlines SecOps processes. A tool like D3 SOAR, with its deep functionality and powerful technology, is especially useful for organizations that find themselves in this staffing predicament.
In this article, we’ll look at a few of the SOAR features that can support IT personnel who are taking on SecOps responsibilities.
1. Playbooks
Even before orchestration and automation came along, creating the SOAR market, incident response platforms offered playbooks to standardize and streamline security processes. Playbooks are a necessity when transitioning IT staff to SecOps because playbooks can put large aspects of their responsibilities “on rails” by codifying both internal expertise and industry best practices. A well-developed playbook library, like the one offered out-of-the-box with D3 SOAR can reduce overwhelmingly complex processes to simple decision trees that even the newest SecOps recruits can execute effectively.
2. Orchestration and Automation
SOAR platforms like D3 can trigger a number of automated actions across security tools. Leveraging integrations, organizations should be able to use their SOAR platform to orchestrate across their entire security stack, or very close to it. In the case of D3, operators can drop automated actions right into their playbooks, with no coding required. This can help ease the transition of IT staff to SecOps by reducing their need to master the technical aspects and interfaces of numerous security tools, giving them a single screen from which to do the bulk of their work. The speed of automated actions also accelerates response times, alleviating some of the pressure to act rapidly during security incidents.
3. Reporting
Detailed reporting and metrics are necessary for SOC managers to have visibility into how their new team members are performing. Reporting capabilities vary between platforms, but D3 can provide ad hoc and scheduled reports on virtually any data in the system, including important analyst performance metrics like number of open tickets and mean time to resolution (MTTR). D3 can also send automated notifications to managers when specific benchmarks are not met, such as an incident going unresolved for a certain amount of time.
4. D3 Attack Investigator
Uniquely among SOAR providers, D3 has brought the entire MITRE ATT&CK matrix into the platform. D3’s Attack Investigator helps inexperienced security analysts handle complex attacks by finding subtle correlations and narrowing down the search for malicious activity based on a dynamic kill chain. If D3 finds one sign of an attack, it searches for other signs based on what the attacker is likely to do next, and what they might have already done. With MITRE’s comprehensive knowledgebase of adversary tactics and techniques fully embedded in your SOAR platform, security analysts don’t need to rely so heavily on their own knowledge of cyberattacks.
You can download your own version of the MITRE ATT&CK matrix in Excel.
D3 SOAR empowers security personnel of all experience levels to work faster and more effectively in the fight against both day-to-day risks and sophisticated targeted attacks. To see the platform in action, schedule a one-on-one demo with one of our cybersecurity experts today.
